Trip Overview
October 9 - 21, 2014

• This journey was a long time in planning. Months before Patty and I left State College --- even before our house was sold --- we had made the deposit for this Viking River Cruise. Trusting that we would, indeed, move to Arizona before traveling to Europe, our flight bookings were made with Phoenix Airport as the origin.
  
  For the very first time ever, we joined another couple in traveling together. Diane and Jan have been our dancing and biking friends for years. Our move to Prescott, all of us knew, would put an end to our frequent carpools to dances as well as other enjoyable get-togethers. When you move, you may not be able to take your friends with you but you CAN plan some quality time together after the move. That is what we did. It went so well, in fact, we hope it won’t be the only time we travel together.
  
  Getting even two retired couples, living on opposite sides of the country, to arrive nearly simultaneously in a foreign country is a venture fraught with risk. Remarkably, though, this idea, born many months earlier, came to fruition pretty much as we had hoped, a few colds and false alarms notwithstanding.
  
  If a picture is worth a thousand words, then this photo taken in Budapest speaks eloquently of new and happy memories, camaraderie strengthened by shared travel, dancing fun and pleasurable times spent together:
  

  

  
  Our water route from Nuremberg to Budapest was all on the Danube except for a stretch of the Main-Danube Canal out of Nuremberg:
  

  

  That man-made waterway links the Rhine and Main Rivers with the Danube, providing a navigable artery from the North Sea and Atlantic all the way to the Black Sea. The present canal was completed in 1992.
  
  Our adventure began in Nuremberg with a pre-cruise extension and ended in Budapest following a post-trip extension --- well, at least, our trip ended there. Diane and Jan managed to add a few more days to their trip due to a Lufthansa pilot strike. How they managed to extend their stay at little or no expense will be revealed later in this narrative.
  
  As a final note --- lest you puzzle too long over the dates on some of the photos --- be aware not all are correct.